The president of Harvard is facing new accusations of plagiarism
New allegations of plagiarism have surfaced against Harvard President Claudine Gay, indicating that attacks on her qualifications to lead the Ivy League university continue, pushing the university deeper into debate over what constitutes plagiarism and whether Harvard should lose its president and holds her students. to the same standard.
The allegations were spread through an unsigned complaint published Monday in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online magazine that has launched a campaign against Dr. Gay led. The new complaint added to about forty accusations of plagiarism that had already been circulated in the same manner, apparently by the same accuser.
Harvard declined to comment on the latest allegations on Tuesday.
The Free Beacon article ramps up the pressure that began after a disastrous December 5 congressional hearing in which Dr. Gay and two other university presidents – from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania – appeared to be equivocal when asked whether students would be punished if they called for the genocide of the Jews.
Dr. Gay won a vote of confidence from Harvard’s board of directors, known as the Corporation, on December 12. But the Corporation’s statement also revealed that it had conducted a review of its published work after receiving allegations about three of its articles in October.
Dr. Gay now faces an investigation into the plagiarism allegations by the same congressional committee that conducted the hearing on anti-Semitism.
Harvard said that in its discussions of the plagiarism allegations, which included an independent review by three external panelists whose identities have not been made public, the university found that Dr. to the level of research misconduct.
Dr. Gay has vigorously defended her work. “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” she said in a statement on December 11, when the first allegations of plagiarism were made. Scattered by conservative activists online and the Harvard Corporation was considering whether she should remain as president. “Throughout my career, I have ensured that my scholarship meets the highest academic standards,” said Dr. Gay.
The unnamed plaintiff’s documents, which The Free Beacon links to on its website, show 39 examples in the first complaint, rising to 47 total in the second complaint. In addition, Harvard’s investigation revealed instances of inadequate citation in her dissertation and in at least two of her articles.
Reactions from Harvard faculty and students ranged from condemnation and consternation to whether the examples cited actually constitute plagiarism.
In interviews and in opinion articles, some Harvard students have said that Dr. Gay raises questions about whether Harvard is applying a double standard in its plagiarism investigations, with faculty members going scot-free for actions that would lead to suspension or worse for students.
Some academics have said that Dr.’s alleged transgressions Gay may reflect practices that were widespread in academia at the time of publication but have been tightened since the advent of online plagiarism detection software.
She has not been accused of stealing big ideas, but rather of copying language from other scholars’ articles, with minor changes to replace or rearrange words or phrases. Often the language in question is a technical standard.
In a typical example, the new complaint accurately cites Dr. Gay from 1997, ‘Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics’: ‘The posterior distribution of each of the district parameters for i is derived by the part that the tomography line cuts from this bivariate distribution.”
The complaint quotes a similar statement by Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard who was her thesis advisor and which she mentions in her acknowledgments: “The posterior distribution of each of the district parameters within the boundaries indicated by the tomography line is derived by the slice it intersects from the bivariate distribution of all lines.”
Her defenders note that the campaign against her is being promoted by conservative activists such as Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and board member of New College of Florida, who opposes diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Many opponents of Dr. Gay on social media notes that she is Harvard’s first black president and suggests she was hired because of her race.
The new complaint against Dr. Gay is preceded by a five-page chronology, written in a tone ranging from somber to sarcastic – under the cheerful salutation: ‘Happy New Year!’ The chronology notes that the unnamed accuser presented the first set of allegations to Harvard on December 19.
In one paragraph, the accuser, who appears to be familiar with Harvard’s policy on plagiarism, explains why he or she did not want to be named: “I feared that Gay and Harvard would violate their policies, act more like a cartel with a hedge fund connected to a university, and try to claim ‘enormous’ damages from me and who knows what else.”
The New York Post has reported that it approached Harvard in October with allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay, and said Harvard has responded through a defamation attorney.
The prosecutor then questions why Harvard was so intent on exposing him or her: “Did Gay want to thank me personally for helping me improve her work, even if I pushed her harder than she wanted?”
The sentence is an allusion to a phrase in Dr.’s acceptance speech. Gay’s 1997 dissertation, in which she says her family “drove me harder than I wanted to be driven sometimes.”
It’s one of the phrases she is accused of copying from the acknowledgments of a 1996 book, “Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation,” by the Harvard political scientist Jennifer L. Hochschild: who thanked another academic.